GRAIL – Grid Access and Instrumentation Tool

Since the release of Globus Toolkit 4 Web services enrich the world of Grid Computing. They provide methods to develop modular Grid applications which can be parallelized easily. The access to Web services is mostly solved by complex command line tools which need a good deal of knowledge of the underlaying Grid technologies. GRAIL is intended to fill the gap between existing Grid access methods and both the developer who wants to utilize the Grid for own developments and the user who wants to access the Grid without much additional knowledge. It simplifies the access and the testing of Web services for the Globus Grid middleware. GRAIL provides an easy to use graphical user interface for executing Web services and enables the user to construct complex relationships between services to realize parallel execution. The underlying framework allows an easy integration of any Web service or other arbitrary task without much additional effort for the developer. Existing technologies, shipped with the Globus Toolkit, are seamlessly integrated into GRAIL

The Java CoG kit grid desktop : a simple and central approach to grid computing using the graphical desktop paradigm.

Grid computing is evolving as a service based, flexible and secure resource sharing environment. Currently, with the help of Grid middleware toolkits, Grids are exposing their services through programming models and command line interfaces, requiring much technical knowledge of the backend Grid systems. Grid portals also exist, but fall short on integrating with native environments and maintaining a uniform user interface from portal to portal. In order to gain wider acceptance within the large and less technical oriented user communities, we need a homogeneous graphical user environment that supports the challenging task of providing Grid users an easy to use, seamless and transparent interface requiring minimal user participation. Motivated by the needs of these users, we are presenting the Grid Desktop based on the popularity of the graphical desktop paradigms such as KDE and Windows XP. The Java CoG Kit Grid Desktop is a user centric workspace that enhances the normal operating system desktop paradigm by interlacing Grid concepts and leveraging commodity technologies like Java. The Grid Desktop contributes to the Java CoG Kit architecture and delivers ubiquitous computing through the Java CoG Kit abstractions, portability through XML and Java Web start technologies, and a simple user interface by following the vastly popular desktop patterns such as drag-n-drop

JavaScript grid abstractions

In this paper, we describe a Grid abstraction framework that allows access to the Grid infrastructure using JavaScript while leveraging the power of current Grid middleware and upperware toolkits such as the Globus Toolkit and the Java Commodity Grid (CoG) Kit . The system is heavily based on Web 2.0 technologies and allows accessing the Grid through a Service-Oriented Architecture. An application interface in JavaScript is provided to enable developers to access Grid services from JavaScript. Moreover, our framework includes additional services to enable the creation of advanced Grid services. The availability of our framework simplifies not only the development of new services but also the development of advanced client side Grid applications. We demonstrate this ability while providing a mechanism to develop Grid workflows through advanced services and a graphical user interface defined in JavaScript. Overall, Grid developers will have another tool at their disposal that projects a simpler way to distribute and maintain software while at the same time being able to deliver quickly advanced interfaces and social services for the scientific community

The Open Grid Computing Environments collaboration: portlets and services for science gateways

We review the efforts of the Open Grid Computing Environments collaboration. By adopting a general three-tiered architecture based on common standards for portlets and Grid Web services, we can deliver numerous capabilities to science gateways from our diverse constituent efforts. In this paper, we discuss our support for standards-based Grid portlets using the Velocity development environment. Our Grid portlets are based on abstraction layers provided by the Java CoG kit, which hide the differences of different Grid toolkits. Sophisticated services are decoupled from the portal container using Web service strategies. We describe advance information, semantic data, collaboration, and science application services developed by our consortium. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56029/1/1078_ftp.pd

Cyberaide JavaScript: A Web Application Development Framework for Cyberinfrastructure

This thesis work introduces a service oriented architecture based Grid abstraction framework that allows users to access Grid infrastructure through JavaScript. Such a framework integrates well with other Web 2.0 technologies since it provides JavaScript toolkit to build web applications. The framework consists of two essential parts. A client Application Programming lnterface (API) to access the Grid via JavaScript and a full service stack in server side through which the Grid access is channeled. The framework uses commodity Web service standards and provides extended functionality such as asynchronous task management, file transfer, etc. The availability of this framework simplifies not only the development of new services, but also the development of advanced client side Grid applications that can be accessed through Web browsers. The effectiveness of the framework is demonstrated by providing an Grid portal example that integrates a variety of useful services to be accessed through a JavaScript enabled client desktop via a Web browser, as well as the opensocial gadgets for Grid task management and file transfer. Overall, Grid developers will have another tool at their disposal that projects a simpler way to distribute and maintain cyberinfrastructure related software, while simultaneously delivering advanced interfaces and integrating social services for the scientific community

Querying Large Physics Data Sets Over an Information Grid

Optimising use of the Web (WWW) for LHC data analysis is a complex problem and illustrates the challenges arising from the integration of and computation across massive amounts of information distributed worldwide. Finding the right piece of information can, at times, be extremely time-consuming, if not impossible. So-called Grids have been proposed to facilitate LHC computing and many groups have embarked on studies of data replication, data migration and networking philosophies. Other aspects such as the role of 'middleware' for Grids are emerging as requiring research. This paper positions the need for appropriate middleware that enables users to resolve physics queries across massive data sets. It identifies the role of meta-data for query resolution and the importance of Information Grids for high-energy physics analysis rather than just Computational or Data Grids. This paper identifies software that is being implemented at CERN to enable the querying of very large collaborating HEP data-sets, initially being employed for the construction of CMS detectors.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Towards Loosely-Coupled Programming on Petascale Systems

We have extended the Falkon lightweight task execution framework to make loosely coupled programming on petascale systems a practical and useful programming model. This work studies and measures the performance factors involved in applying this approach to enable the use of petascale systems by a broader user community, and with greater ease. Our work enables the execution of highly parallel computations composed of loosely coupled serial jobs with no modifications to the respective applications. This approach allows a new-and potentially far larger-class of applications to leverage petascale systems, such as the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer. We present the challenges of I/O performance encountered in making this model practical, and show results using both microbenchmarks and real applications from two domains: economic energy modeling and molecular dynamics. Our benchmarks show that we can scale up to 160K processor-cores with high efficiency, and can achieve sustained execution rates of thousands of tasks per second.Comment: IEEE/ACM International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SuperComputing/SC) 200

Leveraging legacy codes to distributed problem solving environments: A web service approach

This paper describes techniques used to leverage high performance legacy codes as CORBA components to a distributed problem solving environment. It first briefly introduces the software architecture adopted by the environment. Then it presents a CORBA oriented wrapper generator (COWG) which can be used to automatically wrap high performance legacy codes as CORBA components. Two legacy codes have been wrapped with COWG. One is an MPI-based molecular dynamic simulation (MDS) code, the other is a finite element based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for simulating incompressible Navier-Stokes flows. Performance comparisons between runs of the MDS CORBA component and the original MDS legacy code on a cluster of workstations and on a parallel computer are also presented. Wrapped as CORBA components, these legacy codes can be reused in a distributed computing environment. The first case shows that high performance can be maintained with the wrapped MDS component. The second case shows that a Web user can submit a task to the wrapped CFD component through a Web page without knowing the exact implementation of the component. In this way, a user’s desktop computing environment can be extended to a high performance computing environment using a cluster of workstations or a parallel computer